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As of now, Twitter is actively pursuing podcasts. A beta version of Twitter Spaces, which will include podcasts and allow users to listen to whole episodes through customized playlists based on their interests, will be released today.
Stations are topic-based playlists that combine podcast episodes fetched through RSS with Twitter’s social audio events and recordings and serve as the default option when accessing the Spaces tab after the makeover. It’s quite different from the a la carte podcast selection that users of Apple Podcasts and Spotify are accustomed to and instead operates like a Pandora station for spoken word. You can still find the current and future available slots in the tab lower down the page. The pilot program will initially be available in English only and will be made available to a random sample of users from all across the globe.
As more people tune in, the audio Stations will start to sound more like them. However, Twitter isn’t making these playlists from scratch; rather, it’s drawing on its extensive database of user preferences. To a lesser extent, it will take into account the tastes of the individuals they follow. “What we’re really trying to convey here is as if it’s like another user offering you something,” Twitter senior product manager Evan Jones, who specializes in audio, told Hot Pod.
Finding new podcasts may be a challenge, with most people relying on recommendations from friends or the top 100 lists. So yet, no service has been able to solve this problem on their platform.
Having a single app for both sharing and listening to podcasts would have obvious marketing benefits, but this is currently not possible. The test version does not yet support clipping, and listening is currently restricted to the Spaces tab rather than the timeline itself. However, podcasts might benefit from Spaces’ clipping functionality in the future.
There may be a good synergy between Twitter and podcasts. After the worldwide success of Clubhouse in 2020, Twitter expanded into audio with the release of Twitter Spaces. Jones said that research from his organization shows that 45 percent of Twitter users are also monthly podcast listeners (given how news-oriented Twitter is, that makes a lot of sense). Meanwhile, this year’s data mining has discovered evidence that Twitter is testing out a dedicated podcast tab.
Some of it was correct. Jones said, “We were trying out various concepts.” “As we chiseled away at the block, we eventually reached this, but podcasts were destined to be a part of Spaces.”
While Jones wouldn’t commit to a specific release date, he did stress that feedback from the beta will be taken into account when designing the final product. Feel free to contact me with any feedback you have regarding your time as a guinea pig.
